Set in a glam ad agency in New York City during the 1960s, Mad Men is the visually intoxicating, densely written, Emmy-award winning television series that’s just returned to AMC (American Movie Channel) for a fourth season. It takes place in advertising’s “golden age,” when a creative revolution in the industry was changing the tone of ads from formal and fake to human and funny.
Don Draper, the show’s dapper, dynamically starched, Brylcreem-dabbed protagonist, is Sterling Cooper’s prized creative director. Dashing but somehow glum, Draper is a brooding, boozing, womanizing, ambitious, hard-working newly-divorced family man—a contradictory character with secrets. As such, he’s the ultimate American archetype—a Gatsby-esque outsider who has recreated himself. These days we’d call it identity theft, but as shown in flashback to his time as a soldier in the Korean War in Episode 12 of Season 1, after an explosion he exchanges dog tags with his dead commanding officer. So orphan farm boy, Dick Whitman comes back with a purple heart and a new name. His genius at image manipulation serves him well in his profession: Draper’s rebranding of himself is his best piece of work. With his perfect family, Purple Heart, blue Cadillac and big colonial house with a red door in the suburbs, he is the very embodiment of the sleek, post-war American dream
The many-layered Mad Men has developed a fanatic following. One reason could be that the title—and the mad drinking and skirt-chasing that goes along with it—belies a dramatic series about the shifting identities of women…..
Ad-Men’s Lib
Barbara Lippert probes Mad Men’s DNA
Set in a glam ad agency in New York City during the 1960s, Mad Men is the visually intoxicating, densely written, Emmy-award winning television series that’s just returned to AMC (American Movie Channel) for a fourth season. It takes place in advertising’s “golden age,” when a creative revolution in the industry was changing the tone of ads from formal and fake to human and funny.
Don Draper, the show’s dapper, dynamically starched, Brylcreem-dabbed protagonist, is Sterling Cooper’s prized creative director. Dashing but somehow glum, Draper is a brooding, boozing, womanizing, ambitious, hard-working newly-divorced family man—a contradictory character with secrets. As such, he’s the ultimate American archetype—a Gatsby-esque outsider who has recreated himself. These days we’d call it identity theft, but as shown in flashback to his time as a soldier in the Korean War in Episode 12 of Season 1, after an explosion he exchanges dog tags with his dead commanding officer. So orphan farm boy, Dick Whitman comes back with a purple heart and a new name. His genius at image manipulation serves him well in his profession: Draper’s rebranding of himself is his best piece of work. With his perfect family, Purple Heart, blue Cadillac and big colonial house with a red door in the suburbs, he is the very embodiment of the sleek, post-war American dream
The many-layered Mad Men has developed a fanatic following. One reason could be that the title—and the mad drinking and skirt-chasing that goes along with it—belies a dramatic series about the shifting identities of women…..